We know the folks at Intuit are busy, but we worry that perhaps they forgot to flip their calendar forward some time back in 2007. On Thursday, the company said that it would once again be delaying the appearance of its new Mac version of Quicken.

It was back at Macworld Expo 2008—yes, 2008—that the company first said that it was planning to release a brand new version of its flagship Quicken financial program, dubbed Quicken Financial Life, in fall 2008. If you can cast your mind back far enough, you might recall that the last major version of the program to ship was the venerable Quicken Mac 2007, which was notably not Intel-native.

Earlier this month, astute Macworld forum readers noted that references to Quicken Financial Life had disappeared from Intuit’s Web site. Speculation followed that Intuit might be dumping the long-gestating program.

Intuit Senior Manager of Public Relations Scott Gulbransen attempted to clarify the situation in a blog post, saying that the new version of Quicken is coming but would be delayed until early 2010 in an attempt to bring the program in life with users' expectations.

Feedback from Mac customers led us to rethink our approach to developing Quicken for Mac. We went back to the drawing board and are making changes to everything from what the program does to how it looks. We spent extra time building a reconcile mode for the new register, a robust Windows-to-Mac transfer function for new Mac users (and existing customers running Quicken on a Windows virtual machine), and redesigned the experience to make it look and feel like a native Mac application should.

In what is potentially an attempt to reassure people that the program is really, definitely, certainly on the way, the post also says that Quicken Financial Life will be available for pre-order from Intuit's site on October 12. Of course, that’s little comfort to the Quicken customers who have now been waiting several years for an updated version.

As the old saying goes: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. If at second you don’t succeed, try third base. If at third you don’t succeed, then maybe baseball isn’t your game, son.

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